One Piece Vol. 12: The Legend Begins
- ISBN
- 9781421506647
- Publisher
- VIZ Media
- English release
- Pages
- 200
- Chapters
- 100–108
- Anime
- Season 1: East Blue ep. 1–61; Season 2: Entering into the Grand Line ep. 62–77
Season 1 of the anime stops adapting the manga at this book's first chapter, which makes it the right place for a viewer to start and an easy one to get wrong. Chapters 100 to 108. Episodes 1 to 53 cover chapters 1 to 100, the season's last eight episodes are anime-original, and chapter 100, 'The Legend Begins', opens this volume rather than closing the one before it; season 2 begins at chapter 101, the second chapter here. So a viewer who finished season 1 buys this book, skips a chapter and reads on, and does not start at Vol. 13. What is inside it: the crew gets off the island past a Navy captain, crosses Reverse Mountain and enters the Grand Line. 200 pages, nine chapters. Season 2 runs to chapter 128, twenty chapters past the end of this one.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The seam matters more here than anywhere else in the East Blue, because season 1 adapts a hundred chapters in fifty-three episodes and stops adapting on the one chapter that sums up everything behind it. A viewer arriving from the anime reads one familiar chapter and then nothing they recognize. What follows is the change the series has been promising since the first book. Smoker is the first Navy officer Luffy cannot simply hit, and Luffy does not beat him: a man called Dragon gets him out of it and does not explain himself. Then Reverse Mountain, the whale Laboon and its caretaker Crocus, who explains the log pose and what navigating the Grand Line actually involves, and a village of bounty hunters working for an organization called Baroque Works, which leaves Zoro fighting roughly a hundred of them alone while the rest of the crew sleeps off the party. Nothing the crew learned in the East Blue is any use from this book onward.
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